1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the art of electrical connectors, and more particularly to a land grid array (LGA) socket connector having separate location members for holding electronic components, such as an LGA package and/or another connector in position.
2. General Background
Land grid array (LGA) packages are becoming one of the popular chip packages in the interconnect market. As input/output (I/O) requirements of the chip package have increased, the LGA package needs to be larger in volume, where it can provide a high quantity of interconnecting contacts for signal transmission to a printed circuit board (PCB). In order to enable an effective and reliable attachment between the LGA packages and the PCBs, various LGA connectors have been developed.
However, with the increasingly large LGA packages, these conventional LGA connectors have many disadvantages. For example, these conventional LGA connectors are designed to be very complex, and thus may occupy much more valuable “real estate” on the supporting printed circuit board, which is undesirable in pursuit of miniaturization of electronic components. Further, these LGA connectors are typically directed to specific LGA packages. That is, one LGA connector is merely applicable to certain types of LGA packages having uniform sizes, and there is no flexibility of the LGA connector for application to another LGA packages with varying sizes. This will increase additional cost of manufacturing electronic components, which involves the application of the LGA connectors.
On the other hand, attempts in forming the large LGA connectors for mating with the increased popularity of LGA packages have been always met with difficulties resulting from material flow and shrinkages problems that were magnified as the contact receiving array formed on the LGA connect became larger. Therefore, if the LGA connector were formed from a multiple smaller sections, some of these problems may be solved.